I’ve been thinking a lot about the disenchantment of the world that occurred in Western Europe following the Enlightenment and the helpful corrective that some aspects of Eastern Orthodoxy can offer us for recovering a sense of God’s presence in the world around us.
First let’s consider the changes that took place in the experience of the average Christian between the 16th and 18th Centuries.
Church in England at the start of the 16th Century was an experience in itself, the services were an assault on the senses for one thing. Church buildings were ornately decorated with images on the walls and in the windows, incense filled the air, statues lined the halls as transcendent wonder was felt. Priests wore richly embroidered robes and were able, in the minds of the parishioners, to literally make Jesus appear before their eyes - and fill their stomachs. Upon saying ‘this is my body’ the bread of the mass, so it was believed, was transformed and Christ appeared in front of them. God was thus not remote but near, the spiritual world was near and the community of the church included those who were longer alive. Saints were believed to be around them participating their services and present in their relics, all of which kept the veil between heaven and earth thin as angels also walked and worshipped among them. The physical world hummed with God’s presence, all of it enchanted by the Spirit’s breath.
Church in England, at the start of the 18th Century was very different. God was still near but there were fewer physical cues that helped a Christian’s senses access his presence. Christ was no longer in a believer’s stomach but dwelt instead in his/her heart by faith, apprehended in the sermon through the ears. The bread was now merely a metaphor of Christ’s body, the saints had been banished from daily life consigned to the bin of heresy, relics were now considered to be a papist invention, a superstition, which also had the effect of making angels seem further away as well. Statues had been beheaded, images had been stripped from the sanctuary and priestly robes replaced by plain vestments.
None of this is to say the church of the 16th Century was right and the 18th wrong. The Reformation was a necessary corrective to an institutional behemoth overflowing with corruption. It’s only to say that it wasn’t all bad, and indeed much of was very good having been developed over a thousand years as Christ’s people had handed down wisdom across the generations.
Reason and rationality in the 18th Century was disenchanting the world and correct (orthodox with a small ‘o’) doctrine was now the main goal of true Christianity. The written word of God beheld in the scriptures had triumphed over the spoken word of God passed down in tradition. In Christianity’s Dangerous Idea a book on Protestant history Alister McGrath writes “the decoupling of the sacred from daily life accelerated the rise of a functionally atheistic worldview in which God was not regarded as an active participant in the world. It is no accident that two sixteenth century European centres of Calvinism - Geneva and Edinburgh - became centres of rationalism two centuries later.”
The sacred had been decoupled from daily life.
God was less present than he was before.
The spiritual world seemed further away, more out of reach and yet, into this world came Nikolaus Zinzendorf and his Christian community in Herrnhurt, Germany. Zinzendorf began to stress a Christianity that was a ‘religion of the heart’ and he emphasised the importance of individual encounters with Christ. So was born the Pietist movement, the legacy of which is still felt in churches like mine. This movement, and the community in Germany, had a direct influence on the Englishman John Wesley who experienced a strange warming of the heart whilst among them that was to result in a revival being unleashed in England.
Wesley’s revival, as with the Great Awakening in America, was a movement that managed to reach working class England. It made Christ real again to the average person and it moved religion away from being an interest of aristocracy only. McGrath points out in his study that something similar occurred with the birth of the Pentecostal movement in the twentieth century.
In Pentecostal Christianity God is knowable and his presence can be felt in everyday life. In opening the church up to immanence of God again this disenchanted world of ours, the world of secular late modernity, had the transcendent draw near again. This time however it wasn’t through the services of the church but by the manifestation of the Spirit that Jesus was made real to people. Christ found a way, he always will.
Given the kind of church that Luther and the Reformers were reacting against it’s understandable that they made the choices they did. The medicine, the word transmitting God’s presence by way of the sermon, suited the malady as they saw it. Or maybe the image of our diet is a better one; lacking vitamins the church was dying of scurvy, it’s just that afterward, by prescribing only vitamins, Christianity became a pursuit of the privileged few, the educated and the literate.
Now, I’m aware that much was done to offset this dynamic: Catechisms were created, woodcarvings were made and songs were composed all to ensure that even the ‘ploughboy’ could know the word of God. My observation is only that with the emphasis being on the word and the word alone, the Spirit was largely absent and the world was emptied of God’s presence. In this way the common class of farmers, the weavers and the cobblers became dependent once again on the religious professionals; not on priests this time but on teachers. Teachers are great, but teachers are mostly capable of training the mind.
McGrath says much the same thing: “God was now encountered indirectly through the preaching of the word, not substantially or mystically through the sacrament of the bread and wine. The clergy were now to be regarded as authoritative spokesman for a distant God rather than as a wonder-working priesthood who ensured the direct presence of God within the everyday material world.”
Whereas the beauty of a church interior was once seen as a mirror of the beauty of God following the Reformation it was feared that the plain buildings seemed only to point to the absence of God, a God who does not speak, a God who couldn’t be experienced.
Welsh poet R.S. Thomas found the silence of an empty church to be a disturbing expression of the absence of God and English rationalist critic Thomas Hobbes pointed out that this Protestant God might as well not exist. A permanently absent God is about as much use as a dead God.
Meanwhile in the world beyond Europe and North America…
Contrast this to expectation for God to be met and known within the physical world common in Orthodoxy. In one of the agrapha or ‘unwritten sayings’ - words of Jesus that circulated among the early Christians but are not included in the New Testament - it is said: “Lift the stone, and you will find Me; cut the wood in two, and there am I.” Or as the common articulation of things goes within Orthodoxy: “God is everywhere present and filling all things.”
The eternal son of God has taken on physical form, he has graced matter with his presence and now Grace can be known in the air and upon the earth that I occupy. My physical postures, my gestures, my kisses and my meditations are all tools by which I can train myself to know him here.
None of this is meant to deny the centrality of the gospel, or of faith in the gospel for salvation. It’s not to downplay the role of preaching as a gift of grace but it’s to argue once again for a greater appreciation of the meaning of matter and of symbol, of image and sound and smell.
If the reformation re-centred the preached word and the charismatic renewal restored the Spirit’s presence, maybe it’s time for the re-enchanting of the world that makes Christ known once more in the Eucharist and in the world around me. Recovering the reality of God’s presence in the world adds meaning to my action, to my appearance and to my actions. I ought to be encouraged to raise my hands in holy prayer as the apostle Paul commands, to cross myself in prayer as the early church encouraged and to sit in stillness observing my breath as the hesychasts of 5th Century Orthodoxy discovered.
It’s to recognise that a religion that’s able to engage with a disenchanted world is one that reminds people of the forgotten country, that calls people to rediscover the meaning of reality as God made it.
The reason in fairy stories that rivers flow with wine, said Chesterton, is to remind people that they flow with water.
The reason for gold and silver, for icons and odours in Orthodox churches perhaps, is to remind people that they’re full of God’s glory.
God is nearer than we know and like how paint reveals wax, our worship ought to show up the fingerprints of the Spirit, manifest in the body of Christ, known in the world around us.